The Complete Collection
by Cold 105
Summary: The Librarian is looking for a special bookshelf in the depths of L-Space. A little tribute to my favourite author.


** A/N:** This is my belated attempt at a tribute to the immense Terry Pratchett. I will not pretend it is worthy of him.

Thank you for everything, Sir Terry. The world is a bit more pointless now that you are not here to make fun of it.

* * *

The Librarian was knuckling his way purposefully along the shelves. He had a book to check on. A whole bookshelf actually.

You can't become a good librarian without picking up an affinity with books and the people who write them. For someone like the Librarian, who happened to have one of the most complex libraries in the multiverse under his care, this also extended to other times and dimensions.

It's a well-known fact (to librarians anyway) that all libraries are connected through L-Space. This allows an expert librarian to be aware of what happens to books in other times or dimensions. The Librarian had used this on occasion to rescue books about to be destroyed centuries ago.

This was not the case today, though. It was not a feeling of danger that had drawn the big orang outang from his comfortable nest in the Unseen University Library. No books were being threatened anywhere right now, at least for the L-Space definition of "right now" (libraries have their own rules of time, as anyone who has seen hours fly by while browsing books in one can attest). What had drawn him here had been a feeling of… completion. And sadness.

The large ape had encountered many strange books during his ventures through L-Space. He was now looking for a particular bookshelf he had discovered once. The books he had found there had puzzled even him for a while. He was in them, for one thing.

There is a thought experiment, certainly not imagined by a librarian, about an infinite library, containing all books that could possibly ever be written. The Librarian had once heard Ponder Stibbons try to explain it to the Archchancellor, who had eventually suggested that they send students there to find the books containing their lectures, thus saving time for the University staff to concentrate on important matters (like the next meal) and getting rid of students as a bonus.

At which point, the Librarian had lost interest and concentrated on the nearest banana. You knew where you stood with bananas. They were not thought experiments. Besides, he did not think it was necessary to inform Stibbons or Ridcully that L-Space was exactly such a library. The libraries of the multiverse did not deserve to have the Archchancellor unleashed on them.

But one interesting consequence of this infinite library was that you could find there books about events the author could never have witnessed (along with a lot of inane prater, of course, but that is an inescapable consequence of having a lot of information available in the same place). That was not too surprising – particles of inspirations are roaming free across the multiverse, randomly bringing unexpected ideas to minds who never asked anything. Sometimes, they can carry knowledge from one world to another. It was therefore not exceptional to encounter books whose author seemed to know a lot about a world and its inhabitants, yet was sometimes not living in the same universe.

The books the Librarian had discovered described events that happened on the Disc with uncanny accuracy. This in itself was not too surprising for L-Space, although the Librarian was vaguely concerned his real name may appear somewhere, but these books were special. What was setting them apart was that their author had a knack for describing everything in such a way that it appeared hilarious even when it had no right to be. A long, uneventful journey through cabbage fields could turn out to be not only riveting but funny at the same time. The most boring staff meetings at Unseen University became comedy gold. Even people dying would often be downright amusing, and not only when the deceased was someone you did not like.

The Librarian had not read all of those books in their entirety, of course, mainly skimming briefly through them to make sure of what he had found. But he liked to visit this bookshelf sometimes to discover that another book had appeared there, with its ornate cover and its rich content, like a gardener likes to walk in a forest to watch wild bushes sprouting flowers not found in his own garden.

Negotiating cautiously around the strange corners of L-Space, which sometimes involve much more than two perpendicular walls and a floor, the Librarian finally reached his destination.

The large bookshelf was loaded with dozens of books. The Librarian was not sure of the techniques used to print and bind them; it certainly involved a printing press, and possibly another automated machine for the binding, as he did not recognise the craftsmanship.

The Librarian looked at the bookshelf, and frowned, which is always an impressive sight on someone whose face looks like a distended rubber sack. A skilled librarian can read a bookshelf just as easily as one of the books it contains. Stacking books is an art shared across the multiverse, and fellow librarians can recognise the intent of one another just by examining the result.

There is such a thing as a full bookshelf. Its last book is neatly stacked across the frame, like a period at the end of a sentence. The full bookshelf has no place for an ellipsis. It smugly states that it now contains everything it would ever need to, and that any attempt to add something else would feel tacked on, rude, and unprofessional.

This was one such bookshelf. It did not expect any more books.

The Librarian felt a deep sadness at the idea that he would never discover a new book here. It meant that, somewhere in the multiverse, there was a universe whose inhabitants would not be able to laugh about the Disc any more. The Disc itself would still go on, of course, carried by great A'Tuin, but whoever had been embellishing the life on it for the benefit of another world had been silenced.

The Librarian felt the need to do something. He bent down and gently scratched the last shelf with one of his long fingernails. Shelves were mainly there to support books and not entitled to the same holy veneration reserved to them, and it was sometimes acceptable to use them to convey an important message.

The large ape took a last long look at the complete collection, pitying the universe who would now lack these stories, before resuming his journey back to his own library and a comforting banana.

The large bookshelf receded in the complicated distances of L-Space behind him, its last shelf now harbouring a scratched comment, a heartfelt tribute from an elite librarian to an elite writer he would never meet.

_Ook_.


End file.
